The Yellow Flower
The professor, 10 years ago, is passing through Istanbul. He has spent three nights here in transit. Tomorrow he flies Aeroflot to the North Russian University where his fiancée is finishing her masters at the Siberian Institute of Logic.
They recite the verses, then prostrate. Salat (prayer) is repeated by salat, continuing the verses, and as they move through the Holy Book, the recitation increases in speed and energy. The worshippers’ act of prostration parallels this acceleration in its ascendant intensity. They don’t merely bow down, they fall, collapse, yield.
The sound of their bodies hitting the earth overwhelms, it is almost fearful in its beauty. It is as if Creation itself dies at that moment.
Yes, like a death, thinks the professor. And as they rise, like a rebirth. The words become barely intelligible, and the air is thick with the words, the men and women have ceased to perform an act of worship, they are enacting a theatre of becoming, a play whose acts are demarcated by falling and rising. The tekke itself is breathing: it is silent in falling and vocal in rising. This is the nature of Man’s breathing.
Our Beloved never ceases to breathe Love. The Divine Breath is never withheld. But our Beloved breathed, gave us Life through the Word of Truth. And the Word is Life and Life is breathing, so we ourselves return to our Beloved in breath. It is our breathing that is necessarily held, drawn in and exhaled.For our reality is logical, and we are logicians, and breathing is proof, and enunciation of the impossible Theorem is our possibility and purpose supreme.
All is the words of revelation, flowing through their bodies to this point of death in submission. A birth in devotion. A death in devotion. A rebirth in devotion.
And in this salat the professor experiences True Time.
Later, the Turks eat a large feast during the long night, as they will return to work during the daylight hours of the fast. This surprises the professor, who is accustomed to ascetic style of fasting and eating during the Month of Revelation. He sits with the elders of the lodge and shares their meal of fish.
A boy and girl are singing a song, Sordum sarı çiçeğe (I asked a yellow flower):
I asked the yellow flower
“Do you have a mother and father?”
The flower replied: ”Dervish father,
my mother and father are soil.”
I asked the yellow flower
“Do you have any brothers?”
The flower replied: “Dervish father,
my brothers are mujahideen.”
I asked to yellow flower again
“Why is your face coloured yellow?”
The flower replied: “Dervish father,
death is close to me.”
I asked the yellow flower again
”Where you stay in winter?”
The flower replied: “Dervish father,
I become soil every winter.”
I asked the yellow flower again
“Do you know me?”
The flower replied: “Dervish father,
Are you not Jonah?”
The Imam of the tekke gives him a gift of fish liver to take on his flight to Siberia. The Imam tells him “This will assist your fiancée on her thesis, and will bless your marriage, protecting you from the Other Side. You think you have been eating the fish here, but it is you who have been consumed by the fish within the waters. Tomorrow you will be released from the waters, northward bound to your love. Only at the final Hour will the fish be eaten. This is the Reality of True Time.”
beautiful post….thanks….Reality of Time… yellow flower..
love n light.
Your stories are amazing in their beauty and simplicity
This one reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges it is ethereal quality, yet it is a Sufi tale also 
Ya Haqq!
wal Asr!
by the token of Time.